Many philosophers, notably Millikan, believe Grice’s theory is far too complicated to be a good explanation of how S’s utterance U can mean P. But our minds are capable of doing some extraordinarily complex things. I’m not saying we necessarily form the plan he proposes, but I certainly would not put it past our brains to do so. However, even if our minds are capable of forming complex plans, and even if they form precisely the plan that Grice mentions, there are still problems for his theory. The question is not whether it’s plausible for the plan to exist every time someone invents a new utterance, or uses an old utterance in a new way, but rather whether it’s possible for the plan to exist in a mind without some kind of established linguistic capabilities.

For me to mean P when I utter U, I have to intend for you to believe, when you perceive U, that I mean P by that utterance. (If the precise meaning of the word “intend” is unclear, we can replace it with “desire”, because that word has been dealt with more fully in this course.) Furthermore, I also have to desire for you, upon forming the belief that I mean P, to believe or do P itself. But what exactly is P itself? Every other part of the situation has been explained fairly rigorously, but it seems that the nature of P has been left largely to our (typically vague) intuition.

Let us suppose that you buy something from me, and then begin to walk away before paying. I, wishing to remind you to do your part of the transaction, utter the word “hey” as you depart. The literal meaning of that word has nothing to do with money, if it can be said to have a literal meaning at all, so this is a case of speaker meaning rather than of linguistic meaning. The ultimate extent of my desire in uttering U (which is in this case the word “hey”) is for you to give me the money you owe me. A translation P into English, then, would be something along the lines of “give me the money you owe me”. But what is the actual content of P? If this theory succeeds in explaining language in terms of mind, the content certainly can’t be linguistic, even if the utterance is a word in some conventional, public language.

The set of concepts required for me to have an understanding of P is quite complex. First, there is the obvious requirement that I have a concept of self and other. If we assume that apes are nonlinguistic (an assumption that I’ll allow, even though I disagree), this concept does not require the ability to use language. The concept of “money” is perhaps unnecessary for an understanding of P, which could just as easily be translated as “give me what you owe me”. The concept of owing something is very difficult to explain nonlinguistically. Clearly, at the very least, its understanding requires some concept of exchange. I am also willing to grant this concept to nonlinguistic minds, but I think the full concept of owing is much trickier.

For you to owe me something, I have to believe that you ought to have given me something that you have not yet given me. This belief would not arise in me if I did not also hold the belief that we were partaking in an activity in which it is customary for you to give me something in return for whatever I gave you. It is hard to see how I could have a belief about what is customary in an act of exchange without having some kind of linguistic capabilities. A language is a conventional system by which information is exchanged, so even if I was incapable of using any spoken language, it seems that economics requires the conventional exchange of information about how much this or that costs. That is, it seems that economics is a kind of language, and thus that the concept of owing something is inseparable from language.

Of course, all of this depends on your own personal theory of mental meaning. Perhaps I can form a belief that means “you need to give me something” without the concept of economics that would normally cause such a belief. Additionally, having beliefs about language may not be the same as having language. If that were the case (however unlikely it may seem), then I could have beliefs that are about economic principles without having a full understanding of the nature of economics, and thus without having any linguistic capabilities.